


Not Half As Fast

by sweetNsimple



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Barry is the Flash, Character Death, Conversion, Immortality, Leonard will take care of Barry, M/M, Temporary Character Death, That's a lie, This could have been avoided with sunscreen, Vague Vampire Movie Marathons, Vampire AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 08:35:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7215259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetNsimple/pseuds/sweetNsimple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard – a creature of the night, a demon, a monster, an accident of circumstances from an ancient civilization – stared down at Barry and felt some emotion which might have been a return of the sentiment, but did not give him words to share.<br/>“Let me save you,” he said instead, which Barry must have misconstrued to mean the same thing judging by the bloody and broken smile that slightly relaxed his agonized expression.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Half As Fast

How young.

How hopeful.

How naïve.

How fallible.

How… _cute_.

How utterly adorable in an utterly human way.

“I could save you, you know,” Leonard told the lost soul.  Even dying, the man’s eyes were full of life, full of some innate determination to survive and overcome, as if death itself was simply another obstacle that he could hurdle over.

Leonard would know that death was not always finite, but for such as this young life – there were only two options and approximately nine minutes to make a decision.  Nine minutes all in all was not such a short amount of time, say, as short as one minute or thirty seconds or no time at all. 

But Leonard had been by this man’s side for nine years, offering him the same two options every time the young life so much as stumbled through the front door with a single bruise.  His mortal body was so fragile, almost laughably delicate, like trying to build a grand fortress out of dry twigs.  His heartbeat was a sputter of candlelight in the darkness, always threatening to give out. 

Every life compared to Leonard’s existence was like that: Flimsy and weak, and then, before he seemed to even have time to blink, gone.

Gone, except for three people.

The first had been the woman he now called his sister – Elisabetta, now named Lisa – from Italy long before the country had been known as Italy and the other he called friend – Meinrad, or Mick – who Leonard had taken from his Germanic tribe long ago.

The third was this person, suffering needlessly in his arms, bleeding profusely and choking on his own life’s essence.  The red against his pallor flesh was almost hypnotizing, like a scarlet dress on an empowered scarlet woman. 

Leonard was not half as young as to lose himself to a color and take what had not been offered.

_Yet_.

Barry Allen looked up at him with clear eyes.  “I…  I…”  He coughed, spluttered, and the blood dribbled down. 

Leonard should possibly turn the young life onto his side so that he did not _actually_ choke to death, but, in the end, it was most likely not going to be that which killed Barry.

The gifted young man was a mess of wounds and broken parts, bones jabbing pointedly under his skin, torso slashed and ribboned to the point where Leonard had checked to make sure that his organs were still inside of his body; whatever other internal damage the young soul had suffered, Leonard could only assume.  The fact that Barry was conscious at all was an incredible show of will and what made the last six minutes of Barry’s mortal life a very iffy approximation. 

Barry’s lips moved, cherry bright, his eyes fluttering shut.  He didn’t have words anymore, but each breath formed a word and only millennia kept Leonard from giving into impatience and desperation.

Five thousand years had not only imparted upon him an absolute apathetic disposition toward the short lives of humans and other creatures, but, even in this, he could not gather enough grief to force himself upon the bright life that had illuminated his existence for near to a decade now.

_‘I love you,’_ Barry breathed, and then wheezed, and then continued to die unnecessarily.

Leonard – a creature of the night, a demon, a monster, an accident of circumstances from an ancient civilization – stared down at Barry and felt some emotion which might have been a return of the sentiment, but did not give him words to share.

“Let me save you,” he said instead, which Barry must have misconstrued to mean the same thing judging by the bloody and broken smile that slightly relaxed his agonized expression.

Three minutes, tops.  At any moment, Barry could lose conscious and verbal compliance would be lost.  Leonard would remain, like a widow worthy of pity and condolence, holding onto the last vestiges of Barry’s warmth. 

Something squeezed in his chest, dangerously like what he vaguely remembered panic to feel like. 

Why would he be feeling that?

A decade may be a long time for a mortal, for someone like Barry Allen, but he had witnessed the passing and going of so many decades that he could only hazard a guess at his own age using the relic dates scrounged up by the excavation crew who had discovered the lost remains of his once proud city in Peru. 

Barry was thirty-seven.

So short a lifespan, pitiful even compared to other humans – and he was dying _for other humans_ , his life wasting away, seeping through the rips and tears of his damn superhero _costume_.

“Give a human superspeed and they think they can outrun anything,” Leonard snapped, on the edge of some sort of precipice that had its name in emotions; of what emotions, he was only willing to admit to a seed of frustration.

Barry’s face was becoming eerily still, but his smile twitched with new animation. 

“Even death,” Leonard growled.  “How does it feel to know that you were wrong about that one?”

Barry’s lips moved, just barely, but each gasp and shudder of each miniscule breath was another word that Leonard could hear on the very edge of his auditory abilities.

_‘Not wrong.’_

It seemed to take Barry a herculean effort to open his eyes and, when he did, they were pale and shrouded.  If he could see Leonard crouched over him, he did not focus on him. 

Thirty seconds.  Barry’s heartbeat was distant, irregular, and fading quickly.

_‘Want to…’_

Barry’s heart fluttered.

_‘See…’_

His drowning lungs heaved and Leonard could hear the gurgle of liquid in them, saw Barry’s chest rise as he breathed out, fall as he breathed in, a wrongness that Leonard knew he could reverse and make right again.

_‘The future…’_

He focused on Barry’s mouth, on the silent words, one hand stroking through Barry’s hair while the other hovered over Barry’s chest.

As if finally finding him through the dark, Barry seemed to _see_ him and look him in the eye.

_‘With…’_

Barry’s heart stopped and his last dying breath escaped him. 

Those clear eyes stared blindly at him from a face that had become worryingly _beloved_ over the past decade, for lack of a better word. 

Leonard kneeled there for a moment longer, Barry’s head in his lap, Barry’s blood forming a pool around them, the carnage and debris of a hard-fought battle around them. 

Leonard breathed out.  Tilted his head to the side in deliberation.  Finally, he smiled – a slight, dangerous curve of the lips that revealed needle-sharp canines and premolars.  “Close enough,” he decided, and his pupils extended over his irises and sclerae until, from eyelid to eyelid and corner to corner, they were completely black. 

He spared a glance for the genetically mutated monster beginning to groan and growl, awakening to find that its legs had been caught beneath the brunt of the collapsing warehouse’s roof.  It began to rage in earnest, huge fists pounding into the cement floor.  Rubble and support beams around it quivered and lifted into the air and it was obvious that the creature believed it would escape using its telekinetic abilities.

“Not a chance,” Leonard drawled, and the monster’s red eyes focused on him.  The look of concentration on its face told Leonard that it was attempting to take control of him, to use his mind, as he had seen the abomination do on others.  He even felt a slight pressure, like a growing headache, against his mental walls.

He hadn’t survived this long without learning a few tricks himself, though, and if a damn dirty gorilla that had been living in Central City’s sewer system thought it could overpower his millennia of experience…  Well.

Leonard was already planning out Barry’s first blood meal as he pressed a soft kiss to his lover’s jugular before he bit down.  Barry’s skin was almost cool, but not quite.  His blood was sluggish to flow, but pooling and clotting had not yet occurred.  Leonard drank deeply to the aggravating sensation of Grodd struggling to speak telepathically to him.  In moments, the gorilla would possibly try other violent methods of stopping Leonard from what he was doing.

Nothing could stop what he was doing – not until he was done.

He leaned back and rearranged Barry’s body so that the fallible and fragile bloodless mortal was cradled in his arms like an infant – an embarrassingly accurate description for what Barry was about to become.  He picked a glass shard at random from the ground and cut a deep line at his own neck and then, for the third time in his very long life, Leonard pressed another’s mouth to his flesh and let his blood nourish another eternal existence into being.

Grodd screamed, the faintest echo of _NO!_ resonating at the gates of Leonard’s mind.  Rubble and debris were being thrown about the warehouse, coming perilously close to hitting him and his newest charge.  Grodd was coming swiftly to its feet, enough stone and metal cleared away that its legs had come free.

Leonard remained still and patient, Barry’s mouth lax as a crimson second chance dribbled into his broken body. 

Grodd took a thunderous step toward them and Barry’s heart began to beat once more, hesitantly, slow, offbeat, and not nearly as feeble as before.

And Grodd _felt_ it, heard it, perhaps, and took a faltering step back before pushing forward with all the resentment that resided in its towering form.

Barry Allen – _The Flash_ – had been fast. 

Leonard was half as fast, but, considering that Barry had been able to run back in time and on water, no one could necessarily say that he was slow in comparison.

He moved and support beams converged and destroyed the spot he and Barry had been in, crumbling cement and spattering blood that had already fallen. 

Barry’s mouth began to move, suckling like a babe, his body on autopilot, and out of the tens of thousands of small details Leonard had forgotten in his long existence, he burned into his memory the feeling of Barry latching on and feeding from him so that he would always remember that moment of knowing, totally and irrevocably, that Barry Allen was _his_.

Barry Allen now existed because of _him_.

Leonard was going to lord that over his head for _centuries_ if not millennia to come, and his friends as well.

Barry began to drink with fervor, his body twitching as if he wanted to reach out and hold and drag Leonard even closer, but his broken bones and ripped flesh had not yet begun the healing process that would occur only during the very painful conversion.  His enhanced healing abilities as The Flash might help him along, but he was going to need another blood meal that _wasn’t_ Leonard, lest he take too much. 

Leonard looked up at Grodd as the monster stood over them.  Support beams as thick around as Leonard’s body floated above his head with boulders of cement of steel rods – a threat if Leonard had ever seen one. 

He eyed the monster from head to toe.  “You want me to put The Flash down so that you can finish him off, am I right?”

Grodd roared in his face, almost deafening and most definitely unpleasant.  Its breath smelled as if it had been drinking from the sewers it lived in. 

“I suppose I don’t have a choice on the matter, then,” he continued.  “I would rather not, but you do happen to be convenient and also the cause of all this.”

Grodd’s expression of rage became one of constipated confusion.

He smiled with all of his teeth and gently inserted a hand between his neck and Barry’s mouth, forcing the unconscious feeding to an end.  Barry’s lips moved against his knuckles, seeking, before a shudder moved through him and his frame began to fidget and shake in Leonard’s arms.

Carefully, he laid his charge down on the ground.  Grodd looked upon the fallen superhero with divine retribution. 

“He’s not for you,” Leonard clarified as he stood back up.  He felt somewhat lighter than before, energized, which was a sign that he had given Barry more than he meant to.  Barry was breathing with more certainty now, and also more pain.  Irregular jerks and twitches made small noises of discomfort and anguish push past his tongue. 

Grodd bared its teeth at him, eyes narrowed.

He smirked back.  “ _You_ are for _him_.”

~::~

When Barry had first discovered that the Rogues were led by a trio of vampires that had lived not only centuries, but _millennia_ , he had almost been killed by Mick and Lisa.  After all, dead men couldn’t speak and that was a secret even he thought he hadn’t been ready for.  With everything else he had been through, everything else he had seen, everything else he himself had done, vampires actually existing had pushed his limits. 

There had been that one time with Blackout who had been _kind of_ like a vampire, but, at the end of the day, Farooq had been a human being, like Barry Allen and dozens of others, who had been negatively affected by Eobard Thawne. 

Snart and Lisa and Mick?

Mick was the youngest of them and he was almost _two thousand years old_.  They had survived by drinking the blood of humans and cleverly developing salves and spreads that allowed them to walk in direct sunlight with only faint sunburns as side effects.  No faulty particle accelerator had given them enhanced speed, healing, strength, or endurance – they had had all of that _long_ before Central City was even _founded_.  And, worst of all, they hadn’t just been conning people for the past decade or two or three – they had been conning people for _hundreds_ of years.  They had evolved as technology had evolved and their cunning and skill had grown with their experiences.

Before them, Mick on one side and Lisa on the other, Barry had been ready to fight for his life.  He had survived so much – he couldn’t just _die_ , not then, not at that time, not by them. 

A part of him, though, had faltered.

They hadn’t spent their long existences twiddling their thumbs.  They were fast; slower than him, sure, but faster than humans.  Their fighting skills had been honed by wars time could not even remember, by battles and brawls that possibly no historian in the world knew about.

Barry had the hand-to-hand combat ability of someone who occasionally hit a punching bag and was wheedled by his adopted sister into a spar every now and then. 

There had been many times where Barry wasn’t completely sure if he would survive an encounter and that moment had made it into his top five near-death experiences. 

And then Snart had stepped out of the shadows like some true creature of the night.

_“We kill him,”_ Snart had said, _“and the least of our worries will be someone finding out that we don’t fit the dictionary definition of ‘human’.”_

They had let him live after numerous threats to his loved ones if he ever told anyone about what they were.  The threats had enraged him – how _dare_ they? – but the shock of their existence and the knowledge that he really could not tell anyone had made him promise.  This wasn’t like being The Flash.

This was about making sure that the people of Central City didn’t devolve into witch hunts and panic.  If he, after everything he had seen, was having so much difficulty with processing the truth, then there was no doubt in his mind that everyday citizens – the ones that could be convinced – would give into dangerous paranoia and fear.  And the military?  Realizing that it was possible to create immortal soldiers immune to most causes of death and who had superhuman abilities without having to cause a second particle accelerator explosion?  He wasn’t going to let it happen.

It was a given that he would eventually tell Iris, Caitlin, and Cisco, and that they did eventually, despite how incredibly impossible it sounded, believe him.  He almost told Joe and Eddie too, held off on it for a good long time.  Joe had a history of not always believing in Barry when he needed him to, even if he did always come through in the end, and he left Eddie up to Iris’s discretion.

Other than them, the fact that vampires existed was a better kept secret than his alter ego.

Which was _not_ funny, Cisco.

Because his alter ego _was_ a secret, honest.

Lots of people had no clue that he was The Flash.

That was beside the point, though.

A few months after finding out, scientific curiosity moved him to search every possible abandoned building in nor near Central City for Leonard Snart, A.K.A., Captain Cold, with a stash of vampire movies and bags of candy and popcorn.  It hadn’t been easy to find him, and Barry had begun to worry that he should start looking in graveyards for open coffins, when Snart had actually stepped out into the street as Barry was running past and told him to stop trying.

_“We can use my apartment,”_ Snart told him, his expression halfway between aggravated and pleasantly pleased to be proven right.

What he was right about, Barry hadn’t been sure and he hadn’t cared to find out.

The ‘apartment’ had turned out to be an actual legitimate apartment complex and Snart had a single unit to himself.  Rented.

Barry would have been less surprised to find Snart in a coffin somewhere.

_“Now, what do you want?”_

Barry had taken a deep breath, prepared himself, and then told Snart, in a roundabout, ‘Out-To-Do-Science’ sort of way that, well –

Snart’s eyebrows had climbed up his forehead.   _“You want me to have a vampire movie marathon – with you – so that I can, what? Tell you where they went wrong?  Where they went right?”_

Well, yeah.

That.

Barry had shuffled uncomfortably, the true hopelessness of his actions finally sinking him.  Maybe he should leave, wow, this was a bad idea –

_“Did you bring caramel popcorn?”_

Uh, no?

_“Get some and then come back.”_

Snart took the movies from him and, with a look of disgust, began sorting them into different piles on his coffee table.  Judging by the absolute hatred that blazed in his eyes before he tossed _Twilight_ into the tallest pile, Barry guessed those were the movies he couldn’t pay Leonard to watch.

But, that just raised another question.  Vampires ate?  Real food?  Like, real _human_ food?

_“Get the popcorn and find out.”_

The movie marathon was broken into segments and took months as more and more movies were added to the list. 

Eventually, it wasn’t just Barry making movie requests.  At some point, other movies began appearing, classics and foreign films that Barry hadn’t known of but that Snart shrugged off.

_“Call me Len, Scarlet.”_

Not until he called him Barry.

Len’s lips had curled up and he had looked at him with sharp teeth bared.  His eyes had gone completely black.  _“Fine,_ Barry _,”_ he had purred, and Barry had watched the rest of the movie in stupefied horror.

That had turned him on.

Why had that turned him on?

At least he learned things from the movie marathons with Len besides just how much of a dick Len was.  Barry had always known that Len was a dick, but just how much of one was becoming even more apparent as time went on.

Vampires didn’t burst into flames in sunlight, but they did burn and could be severely injured by it due to the lack of necessary proteins in their skin.  Len and his charges – as he sometimes fondly called Mick and Lisa with a faraway look in his eyes that was as old as time – had developed their own ways of protection against it until better methods had been invented.

_“This could have been avoided,”_ Len had once pointed out dryly as Sonja had been burned alive before Lucian in _Underworld: Rise of the Lycans_ , his arm around Barry’s shoulders – when it had happened and why, Barry had no clue – _“if she had invested in some sunscreen.”_

Barry had whined in soul-felt agony at the callousness in Len’s voice.  _Monster_.

_“Like I haven’t heard that one before.”_

_“Of course we eat food,”_ Len had scoffed at a different time.  _“Blood is necessary, but so is a balanced diet.”_   And then he had harped about Barry’s food choices for a half hour while the anime _Trinity Blood_ provided background noise.

_“Yes,”_ Len had answered him once, eyes warm as he laid next to Barry in bed, _“We’re alive.  We breathe and our hearts beat.  That’s basic physiology”_ He had held Barry’s hand against his chest.  _“Feel that?  That’s a heartbeat, in case you were confused.”_

_“Movies make it look painless,”_ Len had informed him on a separate occasion, _“But a conversion is a very painful experience where you’re remade from your cells up.  Mine happened thousands of years ago and I still remember it.”_ His eyes had become distant like they sometimes did.  _“It really is worse than dying.”_

The sad part was that Len hadn’t been lying for once.  Well, throughout most of their, ‘Is this true about vampires?’ exchanges, Len had been surprisingly honest.  In that instance, however, Barry had had surprisingly high hopes that Len had been exaggerating.  Throughout their nine years together, Len had been at times equally determined to convert him and to make sure he died a human in his late nineties.

For the first hour after waking up, Barry didn’t even believe he was alive.  There was no real thought in his head beyond the aftershocks of burning, overwhelming, choking _anguish_ , as if every cell in his body had been wrenched in unforgiving fists, thrown into a hybrid of fire and acid, and then put back wrong.  When he realized that he was breathing, that he was alive, the only thing that kept him from crying was the wholehearted belief that, if he moved, the pain would come back. 

He stayed perfectly still, not daring to move at all, stuck screaming inside his head, until a hand touched his head.  The surprise of the touch made him jolt, which made him cry out in anticipated pain –

Which there was none of.

The relief was so palpable that the dams broke and he sobbed into the warm body suddenly by his side.  He wasn’t sure if he could endure that sort of agony again if Iris’s life had been on the line.  Of course he would do it, _of course he would_ , but he wasn’t sure if he would without a second thought or a moment’s delay. 

He would probably try to sell his body first or turn to a life of crime. Len would probably appreciate that second one.

“I told you it was painful,” Len’s voice told him ruefully.  “Did you think I was lying?”

Barry didn’t have the courage to speak – his throat felt fine now, but not too long ago had been a different story – and so went with the next best option, which was to keep crying.

“You made it,” Len told him, and there was a hint of pride in his voice.  “Welcome to the night life, Barry Allen.”

And maybe Len wanted to make some quips or say something else, but he didn’t.  He really must have remembered something of his own conversion, or maybe he was remembering putting Lisa and Mick through this, because he stayed where he was and stroked Barry’s hair very gently, careful not to tug or catch.  More aware now, Barry heard two sets of footsteps as more people approached.

When he dared to open his eyes, Mick and Lisa were walking in and then making themselves comfortable around him.  Lisa shushed him gently, curling up next to him with her head in Len’s lap so that she could pet his cheek with the lightest of touches.  Mick somehow managed to move his bulk around him and carefully lower himself down behind Barry, his radiating heat making Barry’s tense muscles relax just slightly.

His sobs, if they had lessened at all, regained power.

“Oh, yes, darling, I know how much it hurts,” Lisa crooned.  “Poor dear, look at you, you are such a mess right now.” 

Her eyes did not hold any genuine emotion for him – he didn’t blame her.  She was an Italian relic, of a time long ago.  Maybe she had cared easily once, but he had missed that period by most likely centuries. 

She did care for him in one sense, though, and it was in the sense that she cared for Len, and Len, who was even older than her, somehow thought Barry was worth the headache of keeping alive and – now – immortal like them.

“I’m –” Barry choked on the shock of speaking without spikes of agony tearing his vocal cords apart, “I’m –”

“Part of _our_ family now,” Lisa purred.  “And we are going to take _good_ care of you.”

“Gonna be a problem,” Mick rumbled, “Con artists raising a do-gooder like yourself?”

Barry made a high-pitched noise of humor because he was still too nervous to really laugh.  “N-now I-I’m always going to be there to s-s-stop your heists.”

“To _try_ to stop our heists,” Len drawled.

Barry turned his head up just enough to see Len’s expression.

“I love you,” he told Len.

Len smiled at him.  “We’ll see how long that lasts.”

“How long does immortality last?”

“Cute.”

Mick growled about leaving if they were going to get flirty with him in bed with them while Lisa tittered.  Needy for attention and reassurance, Barry stopped talking and hoped that no one would comment on it.

It was a true testament for how horrible the conversion was that they all stayed with him until he fell asleep again.

~::~

“When I asked you about conversions, you said I would have to have a blood meal – a source of blood to tide me over…”  Barry swirled his spoon through his cereal.  It was just him and Len in their apartment, him at the kitchen island table while Len eyeballed the coffee machine.  “Was it you?”

“No,” Len told him.  “The person who converts you should never be the bloodmeal – even for me, that would be too draining.”

“…  Was it Lisa or Mick?”

“Neither of them were available.  I had a very limited time window.”

Barry looked down into his cereal like a psychic would look at tea leaves.  “What happened to Grodd?”

“How badly do you really want me to answer that?”

“Did I kill him?”

Len turned to look at him.  For too long, it felt, they stared at each other.

“Almost,” Len finally admitted.  “But I dealt the finishing blow.”

Barry nodded slowly, turning back to his cereal.  He suddenly didn’t care much for food.

“Is it normal to want to throw up?”

“When you first realize that your existence depends upon regular oral intakes of fresh blood?  I wouldn’t remember.  I imagine it gets easier with time.  For instance, _I_ have no memory of ever vomiting.”  He poured coffee for himself and then again for Barry.  Circling the table, he put his mug down and then grasped Barry’s chin in his hand, turning his face up toward him.  “I will take care of you, Barry.  It won’t always be like this.”

Barry swallowed thickly and then smiled, a wan, sad thing.  “I know.  I love you, Len.”  
Len kissed him in answer, which was alright.

After all, Len had already proven by the company he kept that his love was expressed in eternity, not words.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Any tags I need to add?


End file.
